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William Gass at The Millions

William Gass is included in the “A Year in Reading” feature at The Millions. He writes about Rose Macaulay’s Pleasure of Ruins. An excerpt:

Macaulay does everything well, but scarcely does one of her pages pass than she has quoted from another and let those words fall into her own concoction like just the right addition to the dish. This quality – to let her work make way for another writer’s beauty – she manifests as early as page one. She has mentioned that among the pleasures of ruins must be some vindictive ones. I still remember the kid in kindergarten who kicked over my house of blocks, and his glee at my distress and his accomplishment. In the sentence and the quotation that follows she reveals her own love of lists, but I also have to marvel at the lovely dance of ideas, of past time elevating the present, that takes place upon the floor of her prose.